Risky gaming with ZeuS and WordPress

Assassinscreedfrance.fr, a French fan site for the wildly popular computer game, is still infected.

For over 8 weeks, the site has been infected with a Trojan java script redirector that sends visitors to a Russian malware site and connects them to a ZeuS powered botnet. The infection was last confirmed by the AVAST Virus Lab at 12.00 CET, April 10, 2012. And, just to make it clear, this Assassinscreedfrance.fr site is not affiliated with Ubisoft, the developers of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

So far, avast! has blocked over 179,800 visits by its users to this site. And, Assassinscreedfrance.fr is just one of 1,841 sites around the globe that has been infected with this specific Trojan during the month of March.

Powered by variants of the ZeuS Trojan, this collection of botnets has stolen over $100 million from small and medium-sized businesses.

The infection, a Trojan redirector, sends users to Russian malware distribution server with an IP registered in Saint Petersburg, Russia. And yes, this sever is still working, even after Microsofts’ recent takedown of a few dozen botnet servers.

The infection at Assassinscreedfrance.fr is located in the countdown timer in the JavaScript module, a common WordPress plugin. Other sites had infections hitting a wide range of WordPress vulnerabilities. “The bad guys are using an automatic tool that is looking for some holes,” said Jan Sirmer, analyst from the AVAST Virus Lab. “Assassinscreedfrance.fr may have become vulnerable by using an outdated version of WordPress, even though their JavaScript plugin is up-to-date. For the rest of these sites, we can safely say that older programs and plugins are common ways to get infected.”

A quick look at over 6,000 infected sites with the “.com” top level domain showed that 13.6% of them involved some WordPress vulnerabilities. “It is not an uncommon problem,” pointed out Jan. “And it’s mostly resulting from owners forgetting to update their plugins.”

Sirmer, how long does it take WordPress to react to their vulnerability? Why?
Thanks for protecting us and, of course, clean our blog (that uses WordPress)

http://www.avast.com Jan Širmer

Hello Tech,
mostly there is no such a problem with reaction time of WordPress, they are able to react fairly quick but mostly there is a problem with Web owners/ administrators who don’t have actual version of WordPress